Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler gave a rare Everything Now-era interview to the A.V. Club, where he touched on how it was once cool to like Arcade Fire, collaborating with James Murphy, and that one great White Stripes performance on Late Night. Butler also delivered some details on the making of their most critically disliked album, the recent Everything Now. He revealed a truly troubling idea for “Infinite Content,” the song that goes, “We’re infinite content / We’re infinitely content,” which is that there was going to be over 100 versions of the song. Read the excerpt below (emphasis ours):
AVC: Do you do a lot of tinkering with the style and arrangements? For example on the new album, you have multiple versions of “Infinite Content” and “Everything Now.” Is that a common practice for you, to record different styles of the same song?
WB: Sometimes. Part of the idea with “Infinite Content” was that we put a thing online that was just the MIDI files and a score, and we had a bunch of people submit versions. The idea of that was to end up with 150 versions of the same song. A friend of mine who plays in this amazing Cajun band called Lost Bayou Ramblers just sent me a zydeco version of “Infinite Content” in Creole. It’s pretty amazing. I’ve heard a Kraftwerk-type version of it. Pretty all over the place.
Everything Now ended up with two renditions, titled “Infinite Content” and “Infinite_Content.” The Lost Bayou Ramblers had a low bar to cross because neither version is good.
